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Who Says Online Courseware Will Cause the Death of Universities?

By Tom Katsouleas, Dean of Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering. He serves as Chair of the National Academy of Engineering’s Advisory Committee on Engineering Grand Challenges for the 21st Century.

In a recent editorial, Ray Kurzweil, futurist and Singularity Chancellor, compared the current university model to the bookstore model, suggesting that universities will be undermined by online the way that digital books undermined Borders. Others have suggested that universities are headed the way of the newspaper. Others have suggested that online teaching represents a new funding model for universities.

Yogi Berra said predictions are hard, “especially about the future.” With that in mind there are a couple of perspectives to take from predictions in old issues of Popular Science or Scientific American: futurists always over-estimate how soon new technology will manifest and researchers in the field always underestimate it. The bottom line, though, is that while online education poses a challenge for universities, they will ultimately improve them.

I’d like to offer a couple of metaphors for higher education today. One is to celebrate the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) like the onset of the textbooks coupled with public libraries. In theory, this opened the totality of human knowledge to everyone. In reality though, a lot of knowledge is stored in the minds of scholars pushing the edges of their fields. Which means that at the PhD level, research universities play the roles of powering innovation and passing their knowledge on to the next generation. But those roles are subsidized by the undergraduate and Masters education that pays the salaries of the faculty.

It is at the Masters level that traditional universities will first feel the effect of MOOCs. In our visits to corporate partners like Apple and Cisco, it was clear that most top engineers and executives are using MOOCs for their lifelong learning in a way that some used to use corporate sponsored masters programs. Although universities provide individual and team project-based learning that are still difficult to replicate online, a Masters education can be taken anywhere.

What about undergraduate education? The undergraduate period is the time when one discovers one’s place in the world, what it means to be human and develops a sense of joy for the life of the mind. Online education will allow universities to do that even better: for one, they will provide a way for the best teachers to be recognized and promoted for something other than just research, a long time concern in the APT process at research universities. And by moving lecturing online, MOOCs allow in-person time to be more interactive, dynamic and valuable.

There’s another benefit to online teaching for universities that my fellow dean and former ATT Research leader Robert Calderbank calls the “rock star effect.” For example, people buy an album for $9.99 but pay much more to see Madonna in concert. This is the business model metaphor that most closely fits the future of higher ed: MOOCS like CDs and downloads will enable personal learning opportunities at low cost to a large market, while at the same time universities will provide an environment for a smaller audience of undergraduates to gain wisdom as well as knowledge personally from those who create the knowledge. This will allow teachers to become true educators. And as Duke Engineering Professor April Brown is quick to remind our faculty, the Latin root of the word educate is ‘educe,’ which means to draw out that which lies inside the student.

There is room for both MOOCS and this type of university experience. Students will continue to see the value of a live interaction versus one through a screen, but not all of them will have the means or ability to pursue that path. We have to take advantage of what each can provide to bring the full value to the student.

Despite the challenges to universities posed by MOOCs, there are great advantages to them as well. And the best universities will be able to capitalize on those advantages to provide the best value for their students – whether that value is online or in person. Despite what some see as a threat to higher education, MOOCs will only help it get better.

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The “majority” are not rock stars, indeed. What constitutes a “rock star” is, as always, in the eye of the beholder. And for undergraduates, there are very few, if any, academics with which they are familiar. It’s an old (and self-serving) conceit within our universities that students know or care about “brand name” academics – they don’t, by and large.

Yes I agree with this that MOOCs will help universities in a big way. Number of students have increased tremendously and there is dearth of good teachers. This form of education is the only solution to reach to maximum number of students in minimum possible cost. Some try to point out the difficulty of live interaction with the students. For that one can always use virtual classrooms ( http://www.wiziq.com/Virtual_Classroom.aspx ) and the experience is just like a F2F class.

First, I was told my “college experience” was partially so I could meet and interact with people from different places and backgrounds. Second, my old college courses were like my High School courses, so provided continuity of education. Finally, as the concert metaphor used above illustrates, there will always be people willing to pay much much more for a experience. Besides, it is still considered a pedigree to have a degree from a prestigious university. Tradition will continue the very very inefficient college experience way beyond it’s utilitarian life-span.

What gets me is the dinosaurs who claim that personal teaching is somehow better. What they fail to understand is the MOOC will continue to get better, while the college experience will continue to get more and more expensive. Just like people who herald books as somehow better than ebooks, they will go the way of people who prefer their land-line phones over cell phone service. The future is clear.

Dean Katsouleas writes that there is room for MOOCs and universities. If you consider MOOCs as the extreme end of a line indicating the amount of student-teacher interaction (nearly 0) and 1 on 1 tutoring or mentoring as the other end of that line, then we can see there is a large distance between a MOOC and say PhD mentoring. However, the distance between MOOCs and the large lecture model of university education is actually fairly small. If students (or parents) perceive value as the location on this line where most of the education takes place, then MOOCs pose a threat to all levels. If universities want to protect themselves, they should further “distance” themselves from MOOCs on this line.